SUO: FW: Re: "Abstract" and "dimensionality"
John,
Despite the apparent differences, it still comes down to WHAT/WHERE
abstracted to objects/relationships and the use of self-reference to get the
details.
WHAT is an object and WHAT is a relationship depends on personal and
collective experiences but the attachment process, the feelings of
'wholeness', 'partness' etc, is what identifies us as a species and so
allows us to communicate even when the spoken words are extremely
'different'.
Overall the emphasis is on the mindless stimulus/response and the mindful
mediation/representation.
This latter pair reflect the former but at a 'higher' level of abstraction
where the mediation acts to refine and encode the whole of the
stimulus/response and the representation comes in the form of a symbol that
can elicit the same response as the original, and a habit, or set of, where
the response to the stimulus can be 'refined', made more context-sensitive
and so less ALL OR NOTHING.
The mediation/representation process can 'dance' forever but once a
representation is 'made' so we fall back to the mindless
'stimulus/response' - except that the responses are now 'sophisticated' ;-)
Peirce's notion of Thirdness captures the mediation/representation in the
one space - he oscillated as to the exact determination but then we do that
whenever we need context to decide A or B ;-) (the oscillation reflects
'paradox' or the perception of a complex pattern not reducable at this level
other than to 'oscillations' - this reflects the abstraction process of
Brain/Mind)
If you order the Peirce's concepts out pops the static-dynamic emphasis
captured by the what/where distinctions:
firstness (stimulus, quality - static) [semantics]
secondness (response - dynamic : aesthetic, ethics, logic) [syntax]
-- reflection point ----
thirdness.1 (mediation - dynamic) [pragmatics]
thirdness.2 (representation - static) [phonetics]
Chris.
--------------
Chris Lofting
Websites:
http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond
http://www.eisa.net.au/~lofting
List owner:
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/semiosis
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/ichingplus
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
> John F. Sowa
> Sent: Thursday, 3 January 2002 4:55
> To: Horn, Graham; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Cc: cg@cs.uah.edu
> Subject: SUO: Re: "Abstract" and "dimensionality"
>
>
>
> Following are two articles from today's issue of Science Daily
> that shed some light on what is going on in the brain. The first
> article is about the areas of the brain that are activated when
> blind people read Braille:
>
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020102080342.htm
>
> Opening paragraph:
>
> "Individuals who have been blind from birth use different parts
> of their brain when they read Braille than do those who lost their
> sight later in life -- a difference that sheds new light on the
> relationship between thought and language."
>
> The second article is about the effects of that wonder drug
> called the placebo:
>
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020102074543.htm
>
> Opening paragraph:
>
> "UCLA researchers are the first to report altered brain
> function in people who respond favorably to placebo treatment
> for major depression. In addition, the findings show these
> changes are different than those found in people who respond
> to antidepressant medication."
>
> What these studies show is that similar effects at the behavioral
> level can result from different kinds of neural processes in
> different individuals. We all know that what goes on inside
> a computer is very different from what goes on inside the human
> brain, but there is accumulating evidence that different brains
> can achieve similar results with different kinds of internal
> processes.
>
> That is an important reason for analyzing the results or methods
> of human thinking in a way that is independent of the terminology
> and mechanisms of the human brain (or soul or psyche or whatever
> other term anyone might care to use).
>
> The term I prefer to apply to all processes that might be performed
> by the human brain (or the brains of other animals) is "semiosis",
> which is the process of sign manipulation that is analyzed and
> characterized by the field of semiotics.
>
> All brains and all computers are semiotic processors that take
> signs as inputs and generate signs as outputs. The study of signs
> and the processes that interpret and generate them can be expressed
> in terms that do not involve any reference to psychology, neurons,
> or computer programs.
>
> In fact, semiotics is related to psychology as mathematics is related
> to physics. More precisely, semiotics is that branch of applied
> mathematics that analyzes signs in the same way that the differential
> equations of applied mathematics analyze physical fields.
>
> John Sowa
>